The Road

Going nowhere fast

Reviewed by Todd McCarthy · Wednesday, November 18, 2009

This Road leads nowhere. If you’re going to adapt a book like Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 bestseller, you’re pretty much obliged to make a terrific film or it’s not worth doing—first because expectations are high, and second, because the picture needs to make it worth people’s while to sit through something so grim. Except for the physical aspects of this bleak odyssey by a father and son through a post-apocalyptic landscape, this long-delayed production falls dispiritingly short on every front. Showing clear signs of being test-screened and futzed with to death, the movie may receive a measure of respect in some quarters but is very, very far from the film it should have been.

Even more than No Country for Old Men, with which the Coen brothers so perfectly showed what is possible artistically and commercially with a McCarthy novel onscreen, The Road reads extremely cinematically. Filled almost entirely with spare but vivid physical descriptions of a decimated United States in its death throes after an unexplained catastrophe, and with limited dialogue, the book serves up images and tense situations that practically leap from the page as potential movie scenes.

Some things were obvious: The film’s style needed to be as terse, exacting, stripped-down, tough and precise as McCarthy’s prose style. The picture also should have been shocking, haunting and, at the end, deeply moving. As it is, director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) has come up with some arresting scorched-earth vistas captured on locations in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Oregon, but has missed the bigger picture almost entirely.

It’s a survival story in the most elemental possible way, as an unnamed man and boy, about 11 years old, trudge daily through a dark world of barren forests with falling trees, torched towns and vandalized stores, empty roads and depleted fields, in search of food and shelter, all the while taking care to avoid roving gangs searching for defenseless humans to be turned into slaves or, more likely, dinner.

The man (Viggo Mortensen) has a revolver with two bullets in it, then only one. As far too many flashbacks of his pre-catastrophe life reveal, he’s not a military or survivalist type, and he had a gorgeous wife (Charlize Theron) until she couldn’t stand it anymore and took off. But his love for his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has made him resourceful and resolute despite the utter lack of long-term prospects, and he continually responds to the youngster’s despairing questions with answers that insist upon perseverance.

For reasons that remain unclear even after they arrive there, they are walking toward the sea, and dreadful sights abound along the way: skeletons, rotting bodies, naked prisoners locked in dark basements like animals to be butchered (the book’s two most ghastly images have been dispensed with, however). Occasionally, they chance upon an abandoned house with a stock of canned food (Coca-Cola has no problem surviving the apocalypse), clean blankets and clothes.

The drama is one little genre step away from being an outright zombie movie, something that’s much more evident onscreen, with its drooling, crusty-toothed aggressors and live humans with missing limbs; memories of Night of the Living Dead unavoidably advance in all the scenes in which the man and boy take refuge in a house, where they must contend with unfriendly marauders.

Scraps of narration by Mortensen seem like unnecessary afterthoughts, while the preponderance of scenes featuring the wife is explainable only because Theron’s presence needed to be justified by more screen time. Score by longtime Hillcoat collaborator Nick Cave and Warren Ellis borders on the treacly, softening the tone and further conventionalizing a film that should have gone the other direction toward something harsh and daring.